Brian Dickerson: Has CIA declared war on its congressional overseers?

11:46 AM, March 13, 2014

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, says the CIA improperly searched a computer network established for Congress as part of its investigation into allegations of CIA abuse into a Bush-era detention and interrogation program. / Senate Television via Associated Press

Detroit Free Press Columnist

The allegation was so incendiary, and its source so unlikely, that channel-surfers pausing to watch C-SPAN’s ordinarily soporific video feed from the U.S. Senate must have thought they had stumbled upon an episode of “Homeland” or “House of Cards.”

But no, this was real life. And here was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the discreet and deferential chairwoman of the Senate’s secretive Intelligence Committee, publicly accusing the CIA of conducting a not-quite-constitutional counterintelligence operation against its own government’s legislative branch.

In an extraordinary denunciation of the nation’s top intelligence agency, Feinstein charged Monday that the CIA had hacked into her committee staff’s computer files and removed hundreds of pages of agency documents that reflected unfavorably on the CIA and its acting general counsel, Robert Eatinger.

The files included an internal CIA review of the controversial detention and interrogation program the agency conducted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Eatinger says that Feinstein’s investigators had no authorization to see the review and has asked the Justice Department to find out how it came to their attention.

Feinstein says Eatinger’s interference is an attempt to intimidate the CIA’s congressional overseers and may represent a breach of the U.S. Constitution’s provisions for the separation of executive and legislative powers.

“How this will be resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities,” she said gravely, “or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.”

Who's lying?

John O. Brennan, the man President Barack Obama appointed last year to lead the CIA, dismissed Feinstein’s allegations and said they would be disproved “when the facts come out on this.”

But the intelligence community’s conduct in recent months has been notable mainly for its lack of candor — and the circumstances make Feinstein’s accusations all too credible.

For one thing, Feinstein is renowned for defending the intelligence agencies she oversees, not second-guessing them. Like Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers, her Republican counterpart in the House, she has been far more critical of National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden than of the excesses he revealed, even since a federal judge opined that the NSA surveillance program that Snowden exposed was probably illegal.

Feinstein is also a Democratic stalwart whose president (and former Senate colleague) has repeatedly signaled his desire to make a clean breast of the CIA abuses detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s still-secret report. When she publicly accuses Obama’s CIA director of spying on Senate investigators, she is leveling an allegation far more serious than those raised by Republican conspiracy theorists obsessed with Benghazi or the IRS.

Conflict of interest

Eatinger, meanwhile, may have a personal interest in suppressing both Feinstein’s still-secret report on the CIA’s interrogation program and the agency’s internal review, which is believed to support the congressional investigators’ conclusions.

Eatinger was attached to the Counterterrorism Center that oversaw the controversial interrogation program, and he has been identified as one of two CIA lawyers who approved the destruction of videotapes documenting the agency’s brutal interrogation techniques, which included water-boarding and other methods that the agency’s critics say qualified as torture. In her statement on the Senate floor, Feinstein acidly noted that Eatinger’s name appears in her committee’s report more than 1,600 times.

If true, Feinstein’s accusations describe an intelligence agency drunk with its own sense of self-righteousness, one where serious constitutional violations are excused as the necessary means to an end so manifestly virtuous that no congressional body has the right to scrutinize it.

That delusional conception of national security might fly in North Korea or Iran, but it is fundamentally incompatible with democratic notions of constitutional government. Feinstein’s indictment commands the Obama administration’s most urgent attention, and if her allegations that the CIA spied on its congressional overseers are sustained, the dismissal of those responsible should be only the first step in a thoroughgoing reassessment of the agency’s charter and leadership.